Seny, Rauxa and whatever it takes

The exhibition Seny i rauxa. Notícia de l'arquitectura catalana, which you can still visit at DHub until September 6, is an incredibly dense survey of modern Catalan architecture (if they’re not careful, they’ll end up including Gothic, Romanesque and even the Temple of Augustus) that leaves you with a considerable, but ultimately healthy, sense of overload: by the end, you really have seen everything. The beauty we are capable of creating and, equally, the profound ugliness we know how to build. A holistic overview combining photography, models, text and furniture (and the occasional brilliant painting), placing us before that famous mirror between seny and rauxa. There is just one small problem: it is not always easy to tell one from the other.

Let me explain. If you call an exhibition Seny i rauxa, the narrative should stick as closely as possible to that wonderfully suggestive title. Instead, what we have is a very impressive survey of our architecture and urbanism that does not label things too much, describe them too closely or pass too much judgment, but leaves it up to each visitor to decide which pieces belong to reason and which to madness —or, at the very least, to identify the qualities of restraint and abandon within a single work. No: they have preferred to leave absolutely nothing and no one out, making it virtually impossible to draw a clear distinction between seny and rauxa. It could have been done with a narrator, a scriptwriter, a storyteller. But they have chosen, I suppose, to consult an encyclopedia salesman.

It is a beautifully presented, enormous exhibition, splashed with a vivid red that surrounds the entire gallery and its central panels. Photographs and texts hang along them (with useful numbering to guide you), while the central spaces are given over to models, objects, books and specialist magazines. The exhibition takes us from 1875 to the present day, and I insist: you leave it having learned a great deal. The chronological order is also divided thematically into The Room, The House, The Apartment Building, The Buildings, The Street, The Old City, The New City and, naturally (sigh), The Territory.

Fortunately, the sculptures by Tàpies (a large floating rectangle) and Barceló (a dragon-shaped totem made of molten bricks) bring some breathing room to the entrance, which immediately invites us to follow the side panels. They begin, thankfully, with Antoni Gaudí’s room/studio and a splendid painting by Ramon Casas (Interior), already set against a graphic representation of a 1976 musical work by Anna Bofill Levi (Quartet for Piano, Harpsichord, Guitar and Percussion). From there, we are faced with a vast torrent of graphics, photographs, plans and drawings, all numbered and identified, with only the briefest of explanations, which we are left to piece together through the description of each section. In other words: we end up skirting around the exhibition’s actual theme —which architecture embodies seny and which embodies rauxa. That was the theme that, personally, had drawn me in. Instead, what we get is an enormous (and by no means negligible) compendium of the Catalan contribution to architecture and urbanism.

Tusquets, Bofill, Gaudí, Domènech i Montaner, Puig i Cadafalch, Bohigas, Tagliabue, Coderch, Jujol, Florensa, Folguera, Duran i Reynals, Miralles... Walden Building, Casa Batlló, Casa Milà, Casa Navàs, Casa Cabtarell, Casa Horitzó, Casa Gomis (or "La Ricarda"), Casa Cambó, Casa Tàpies, Casa Planells, Casa Tecla Sala, Fonda Espanya, Palau Güell, Santuari de Meritxell, Vila Olímpica, Torre Urquinaona.

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by Redacció TheNBP

Wooden beds (a modernist bed with four authors), iron beds (a bed without an author), in the apartments of the attics of La Pedrera (and a wonderful plan of the interior distribution, signed by Gaudí), in contrast with the horrendous buildings on Navas de Tolosa street (Bohigas) or the housing on Meridiana avenue (Bohigas's well-known beehive), faculties, schools, bars (delicious photos of Marsella and London), nightclubs, Olympic villages (again Bohigas's curious Icarias).

Encants Market and Santa Caterina Market (model with photomontage of the sky, on the ceiling), hydraulic pavements placed near Gaudian doors and capitals of the Sagrada Família, Picasso and Miró doing urban decoration, Edinburgh parliaments, universal exhibitions, sketches of the (still abominable) Plaça dels Països Catalans, even new urban plans for Olot or Reus (as is known, "the territory", fortunately illustrated with the beautiful Vayreda "La Terrassa"), tables, chairs.  

Seny and rauxa are there, infiltrated, incognito. Let’s see who can spot them. If the intention was to create a group photograph in which absolutely no one was left out, they have succeeded with flying colours. If they were looking for a narrative, I’m afraid it isn’t really there. It is more of a portrait, a case of “don’t move or you won’t make it into the picture”, a catalogue of everything we have known how to do over the past two centuries. That is no small thing. In fact, it is an awful lot. Entering this exhibition is, in any case, entering into an extensive monologue about one of the defining features of our creativity —and that is why it is a shame that it is not accompanied by a stronger sense of purpose. In fact, if architects had done nothing more than describe reality, they would all have emerged with minds as neatly squared-off as Cerdà’s. Fortunately, as this exhibition makes clear, we have never been short of imagination or rauxa.